And with Nexus 10 looking pretty damn sweet, I guess 2012 can be declared the year when Android tablets finally took hold.
With all the wonderful things Android-phones has done for the general smart-phone, it was about time we had the same revolution happen in tablet-space.
Those sales, while not iPad league, aren't too shabby for a single Android device and, significantly, seem to be growing.
Will be interesting to see what the iPad Mini might do to Nexus 7 sales.
Certainly there are going to be a bunch of them that are people who specifically want an Android tablet, and there are going to be a bunch who are highly price sensitive (question there being are the newer Kindles having an impact) who aren't going to being looking at the new iPad, but there will also be people who just like the form factor for whom the Mini might be interesting.
Short term though I suspect we'll see what we've seen in the smartphone market - plenty of overall market growth meaning plenty of unit sales growth for everyone (except RIM) which will keep the market interesting.
FYI, Apple sold an average of 5 million iPads a month in 2012.
From TechCrunch
"On the Apple side, the company sold nearly 60 million iPads during its 2012 fiscal year. But that’s a different market, one that Apple forged itself. How the iPad mini performs remains a separate question, even though Apple on stage at its event last week framed this as essentially a way to replicate and continue that existing success. Still, the iPad mini goes on sale in many more countries with an ecosystem that’s much more globally available than its small tablet competition, so it’s fair to assume Apple will beat competitor device sales, but by how much remains a key question."
I am looking to pick up a Nexus 7 this week to evaluate its gift potential. There are two areas where it falls behind the iPad mini for me. First is the Apple App store appears to be in much better shape. I can get around that pretty easily, the second is the lack of back facing camera.
The reason the second issue stands out is that I would like to gift these to my niece and nephew. When using my iPad or their parents smart phones they love to use the camera to take pictures. So I am was a bit disappointed over the omission.
The main point in the Nexus 7's favor for me is its price. So the make or break will be software, namely some learning apps and games.
I would prefer to avoid buying an Apple product; I own many; based on their emphasis on lawsuits recently but they do have some features on their tablet that are hard to pass up and the old adage reworded for our age probably holds true, no one will be disappointed getting an iPad for Christmas. (the old adage of no one was fired for buying IBM)
One area Apple have a significant advantage is with kids who've grown up with iPod Touches (or iPods Touch for the pedants) and are therefore familiar with iOS and the apps available on the app store.
If I were looking for a present (a very generous present I might add) for kids between 8 and 18, I'd be hyper aware that they may have opinions on what they want and be guided by that.
My six year old can switch between my Transformer tablet and my wife's iPhone without even blinking an eye. Kids tend to not be set in their ways like us old people.
Agree with that (have actually just posted similarly above), I was more thinking if all their friends are making movies with iMovie or whatever, that's what they'll want to be doing.
Niece and nephew are seven and nice respectively. I would like to encourage them to use the devices for something other than games. Having no children of my own I am not even sure where to begin when it comes to app selection.
Being children their interests do change often but helping them in their schooling, something that is self directed so when mom isn't around to encourage them the software itself is engaging enough to do so.
So I am up for recommendations. I am more than willing to load up apps for whichever tablet I give them and in fact would be much happier if I could deliver them experience out of the box.
As someone who owns both an iPad and Nexus 7 - they're both great devices. But, if you're looking for "learning apps and games" - the iOS App Store wins, hands down. The Android store is definitely growing with respect to games... but I've found the quality of "learning" apps to be quite low on Android. I'm not sure why, and I'm sure it will get better.
If you're looking for "learning" apps for kids aged 2 - 14, I'd stick with iOS devices (for now).
If you really want something that only requires the device, the Android Scripting Environment is pretty awesome, and it comes with a dozen examples for things like controlling Android's speech synthesizer which a kid could have a lot of fun playing around with.
iPhoto, iMovie, Garageband, Paper, music apps e.g. AniMoog, Newspaper apps, Diet Coda. Those are just a few I use. But seriously EVERY tablet app will be better on iOS.
Why ? Because Apple/community encourages developers to rethink the tablet experience. Android encourages them to simply scale.
I come from an iOS background (my last phone was an iPhone 4, my last tablet was an iPad 2; now a Galaxy Nexus and Nexus 7) and am not frustrated in the least by "a lack of good apps."
I'm pretty happy with everything on my phone: the Google apps are great, the Kindle app is completely fine, AndChat, Grooveshark, Songbird, a bunch of emulators for games...all works just fine. Some apps don't look great on the tablet, but I use the tablet almost exclusively for Kindle and ePub reading (works fine) and some web browsing (ditto).
I've tried many mail apps for my Android tablet, and none comes close to the mail app for iOS. The one exception is the Gmail app -- but I don't use gmail (ironically, for lock-in reasons).
Without wanting to inject too hyperbolic a representation of Apple. Please don't buy kids iOS devices. There's nothing wrong from an application or usability perspective, it's just that restricting them to an extremely closed platform is likely to have future ramifications.
Could you substantiate, or even just explain, that in some way?
My take would be that children change so much and so quickly that they're very hard to lock into a device or a platform. The things they cared about last week they don't care about next week which means that their old apps are largely irrelevant to them, and their brains are so adaptable the learning curve on a new device is no barrier at all.
The kids down the road from me have iPod Touches, the ones with phones have a BlackBerry and an HTC Android phone respectively, they share the family iPad and both have or use Windows 7 PCs. They move between these without a second thought depending on what they're doing, what's nearest, their mood or who the hell knows what other reason.
Let children choose what they want to be interested in and encourage it without pushing any prejudices you may have on them. This is technology - how much of what we thought was a big deal 10 years ago remotely matters today? Anyone still fretting about Microsoft's monopolistic attempts to take over the internet?
> My take would be that children change so much and so quickly that they're very hard to lock into a device or a platform. The things they cared about last week they don't care about next week which means that their old apps are largely irrelevant to them, and their brains are so adaptable the learning curve on a new device is no barrier at all.
I am not arguing from an ideological perspective. I am not concerned that their use will teach them soley the iOS way of working. I am concerned about actual lock in.
Apple spends a lot of money on ensuring that their flagship functions (iMessage, AirPlay, Maps etc) are strictly available only on their hardware or through licensed solutions.
Having all of your music in iTunes/iCloud, having most of your friends on iMessage, owning physical hardware with only iDevice connectors or software support etc. These are the future ramifications I am concerned about.
iMessage sends and receives text messages. That's a pretty weak lock in - there pretty much isn't a mobile phone made that it can't interoperate with going back a decade or so.
Maps, I'm curious as to how this is a lock in, or who it is who is desperate to get Apple maps on their non-iOS device but I'm sure as this is an Apple issue you'll be able to point me at where I can get the great official Android Maps / Navigation app for my Kindle Fire then? Oh yeah, it's official licensees only.
And the version of BlackBerry messenger for iOS? Or Android?
And I can access Microsoft Windows Phone Rooms from Android can I?
Specific functionality offering competitive advantage are only ever shared by people when it's in their interest. That's not an Apple specific issue, you'll see the same with pretty much every device.
And physical hardware connectors - Micro-USB as a standard for charging is fine but the fact that they both have a Micro USB port doesn't mean that you can use Android peripherals other than a charger with a BlackBerry or Nokia Lumia.
And for chargers - kids don't need dozens of chargers, in most cases the one in the box will be fine. If not $10 on eBay will get you another one - hardly a massive issue when we're talking about phones generally costing hundreds of dollars.
The reality is that device change has always had barriers but Apple's don't seem to me to be significantly worse that anyone elses.
Apple's are significantly worse, however. Apple does things like use non-standard screws and connectors. They also like to glue in batteries. Basically they make the machine so that it can't be easily repaired or replaced by a qualified technician. They also reduce the ability to recycle certain components by gluing them to the case.
I'm a longtime Apple technician and things started going downhill when the iMac came out. The Apple machine is pretty on the outside. Perfect for the folks that buy them.
Ridiculous. Androids are not like Apple IIs where a young kid can figure out to hack on them; in practice very young kids have absolutely no means of caring about whether their phone is "open" or not. The kind of openness provided by Android means absolutely nothing to a kid.
I am not arguing that Android in-particular is superior, just that the ability to choose the vendor of your device is a significant freedom that can be lost.
I appreciate that Android always has Google as a vendor somewhere in the chain, and I'd like to see variety there too. It's possible to use App based ecosystems and respect everyone's rights at the same time.
I favour an independent app store where the majority of the computing and bandwidth infrastructure is taken up by the developer. This reduces the cost of the app store so they can operate without mandatory contributions and as a result permits unlimited flexibility.
And Google has been engaging in anticompetitive/illegal behaviour (FRAND patents), abusing privacy (Safari DNT) and capitulating over human rights (China). All the while basing their whole business on selling advertising.
For me Google sounds like the worst company to be sharing your children's data with. No ?
You indict Google as if they were the only offender, however more significant anticompetitive, privacy infringing or capitulation could be pointed out of all of their competitors.
Yes, Google are involved in most Android devices. They don't however mandate any dominance over the device. Using an Android device without Google's apps is not only plausible, but common.
Given that all companies are evil (and they certainly all are if you cherry pick enough evidence), it seems reasonable to pick the most open, unlocked ecosystem so that at least you have the freedom to control your exposure to it, leave the system and exercise your free will.
The thing I've never understood about this is I have that freedom with an Apple device. If I find that I'm being constrained in ways I don't like, I simply sell it and buy something else.
Absolute worst case (which is massively unlikely) I'm a few hundred dollars down (which I can afford). Realistically any unpleasant constraints would come in gradually and I'd just buy a non-Apple phone at the point I would have upgraded my iPhone and I'm not even financially down.
How am I constrained in any real, meaningful sense?
Well, for starters, if money is no object then everybody is free. It kind of defeats the whole point of the argument to take such an important constraint away and then pose the question "how am I constrained?". Keep in mind that Apple's whole ecosystem is closed, not just their devices. I can't read their iBooks on my Android tablet, play their games on anything but Apple hardware, etc. Even the connector is patented to control every single digital bit that travels to and from the device. So in 10 years from now you might be up for much more than "hundreds" but thousands or tens of thousands if you have accumulated your lifetime library of content there.
But more seriously, your solution works only as long as there is "something else". So you're predicating the whole thing on the fact that there's an external entity out there for you to flee to. The problem is that we're moving headlong into a dystopian future where there simply isn't any ecosystem left where you can go. The least worst option at the moment is Android because it allows side loading and is open source so if Google turns evil enough you can be sure that someone else will come in and fork it to compete with them (you can argue that already happened). You can even create your own builds and deploy them to your phone if necessary. Now I'm not advocating any such extreme tin-foil type things in reality, but I do think it's vitally important we preserve at least the ability or freedom for these options to occur, because they keep all the other players honest.
Not from a hardware perspective definitely. But when a kid's interest in software is piqued at say, 9 or 10, would you rather that he/she be using an open source OS that encourages tinkering or a beautiful black box?
"“I thought the kids would play with the boxes. Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, found the on-off switch … powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child, per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs in the village, and within five months, they had hacked Android,” Negroponte said. “Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera, and they figured out the camera, and had hacked Android.”"
You are joking right? the first thing I did when I got a palm pilot when I was kid was look everywhere for hacks and apps to do stuff that it couldn't do out of the box.
If I were a kid today the first thing I would do is jailbreak my iPad, a process waaaaay easier than getting on the internet and finding apps for Palm before the age of filesharing.
Of course the difference being that I didn't lose the warranty on my Palm pilot for not using official software, but I would for jailbreaking my iPad.
Playing farmville all day does not a hacker make, but coding your own apps? tweaking the OS? that's a great start, too bad first you have to convince your parents of letting you void the warranty on a $500 device.
The iPad Mini seems more like a product that iPad customers would buy instead of a bigger iPad, perhaps because they've always thought the iPad was too heavy, and they wouldn't mind the cheaper price (nor the slower performance and lower resolution that comes with it).
But from what I've seen so far, people use it exactly like a bigger iPad. It seems too big to use it as a 4"-7" device, covering it from the back with your hole hand. You'll probably end up using either with 2 hands, or by the side, like the bigger iPad, so there's not much improvement over the bigger iPad there. It is lighter, though.
My experience with the Nexus 7 (in comparison with light usage of my wife's iPad 2, which I never really warmed too) is sort of the opposite. A 10" tablet is a "small laptop". The 7" device is a "big phone". It's better than my phone for everything I want to use the phone for, and I love it. I'll grab it preferentially to the Galaxy Nexus in my pocket any time there's a choice.
That wasn't true of the iPad, nor of the 10" Android tablet (a development board) I had at home for a while. With those, the choice was always between the big tablet and the laptop, and my experience was the laptop always won.
Obviously, the one spot where a 7" tablet fails is the important use case of carrying it around while not using it. So the phone isn't going away. Nor, obviously is the laptop.
But my surprise is that, unlike the 10" model, there was space in my life for a 7" tablet. It's really a very different kind of thing, and it's not surprising Apple wants to play in that world.
You might have missed his point. He's contrasting the Nexus 7 (7 inches) with the iPad Mini (7.9 inches). He's saying that the iPad mini is sufficiently larger that it doesn't feel like a "big phone" -- unlike the Nexus 7.
... you're right, I misunderstood. Though frankly that's insane. The mini is 14mm wider, 2mm longer and actually slightly lighter. It's simply "the same size" to any sane observer. The attempt to argue that it's not is just Apple marketing, trying desperately to achieve market separation in a segment that doesn't really have much.
I think they certainly fall in the same category, but I'm hoping that the iPad Mini will be slightly better in some scenarios where my Nexus 7 fell short.
I sold my Nexus and have preordered an iPad Mini to see if it'll be more usable while still retaining the portability of the Nexus (which I loved - you could actually stick it in your jeans back pocket)
Browsing the web was fundamentally frustrating for me on the Nexus 7 because you'd either be served a mobile site which looked awful because it was meant for a 4 inch screen or you'd be served a desktop site where you had to do a lot of pinching and scrolling to get the text to a readable state which felt like more work than it was worth.
Especially in horizontal mode the Nexus 7 felt like browsing the web through a letterbox because the OS is quite greedy with the screen real estate and the 16:10 doesn't have that many pixels to begin with.
Perhaps I have abnormally large pockets, but the nexus 7 fits easily in my front pocket of my jeans. I don't buy any particular brand (usually whatever is cheap/on sale at Walmart that they have in my size) and this is the case for shorts as well.
I find I use the nexus 7 far more than any other tablet I have (though admittedly, I don't have an iPad, and even the iPad mini is slightly priced out of my "purchase without thinking twice" range. The only time it isn't ideal for me is when I'm trying to read schematics. At that point I tend to grab one of the 10" tablets I have.
I love my nexus 7, But you're right, most websites assume anything less than <768 is a phone and deliver a single column layout. Even though the n7 is 800px wide (portrait), it reports a device-width of 600px. And of course plenty of websites sniff UA and deliver mobile if they even see Android.
It's not that I'm planning on rocking it like this often, but it's really practical for when you're moving between rooms and have a lot of other stuff to carry.
I understood that there was a fair difference in viewable area - 49% when web browsing. I don't know what that means, and it sounds like a crappy stat, but I heard it somewhere.
The mini screen is slightly larger. My math says 4.7 x 6.3 inches vs. vs. 3.7 x 5.9 (from which I get a 36% difference in area, FWIW). And it has a lower pixel pitch (162 dpi vs. 216).
Neither seems particularly significant to me when compared with a 4" phone or 10" tablet which are vastly larger jumps. But obviously that won't stop folks from arguing about it.
Honestly to the extent that's true, I think the 16:10 android tablet is the clear winner as video content matches one device much better than another. Landscape web browsing is probably best done in squarer ratios, but I'm not sure that's universally agreed (desktop computers, for example, spend their browsing existance at 16:9).
Again, this seems like splitting hairs to me -- trying to come up with something that makes the mini "special" and not just another 7" tablet. Why can't it be just another 7" tablet?
I have ample evidence that I'm a mostly-sane observer. Is everyone who disagrees with you insane?
The 1.5 cm is a huge difference for most people being able to comfortably hold it the way I and most people I've seen seem to prefer to hold the Nexus 7: in portrait mode, with my thumb on one side and my four fingers on the other. I found a book that is the exact width of the iPad Mini (and it's lighter) and it hurts my hand to try to stretch it that way.
I'm sure some people with large hands will be able to hold it that way, but my opinion (I don't think you're insane if you disagree) is that most people will not be able to do so comfortably.
In short, 15 mm isn't a large difference in the abstract, but it's quite a lot of difference "at the margin," which is what I think we're talking about. I think it takes you from dimensions that maybe 80-90% of people can hold comfortably in the way I've described to ones that perhaps 10-20% of people can.
When you phone just fits in your pocket and then someone stretches by 5mm and now it doesn't. It is not the same size it is the difference between having to deal with your phone some way (finding another pocket, buying a belt clips etc etc) as opposed it it just fitting in your pocket. There is a big difference from one to another in terms of how the product can be used.
I bought a Nexus 7 and then sold it a month later after pretty much never using it. The only device that it could feasibly replace is my Kindle, and I preferred my Kindle for reading.
The article raises a good point. Should we compare this to the iPad? (iPad 3?) It's a different size and price point. The Kindle Fire is the only other tablet with as high a profile as the Nexus 7, and we don't have sales numbers on that, either (which makes me wonder how they know the total number of tablets).
I'm glad it's been successful as I'm quite pleased with mine, but I'm not sure this announcement tells us anything at all (even if it had clear numbers).
Doesn't surprise me. They got there (the 7 inch space that I'm confident Apple always had their eyes on in their roadmap), before Apple, with a competent device and great hardware.
And I mean, really great hardware... The rubberized backing but still has nice proportions for everything else, makes it akin to the equal and opposite to the latest iPhone. Both awesome hardware designs in their own right.
I think the Nexus 7 bests the iPad Mini in hardware design, whilst the iPad 4 still trounces the ugly Nexus 10.
Have you actually seen a Nexus 10 in person? Early reviews are praising the Nexus 10 hardware design, claiming that it's much easier to hold one handed than the iPad.
When I first saw the Nexus 7 my reaction was "that's a nice looking tablet". I think I'd even go as far as agreeing with you that it edges the look of the iPad Mini.
Conversely when I first saw the Nexus 10, my reaction was "MY EYES, MY EYES".
I have no idea whether the lawyers had waded in a told them to make it look less Apple like or whether someone was just having an off day, but cosmetically, to me at least, it's a disaster.
(Note, I'm going on looks alone, it may be a very functional design but man, is it ugly).
Great news for Google, except the hardware quality doth suffer. I had to RMA my first one, as the audio jack was spotty and only outputted one channel. The second one arrived with exactly the same issue and a screen that wobbled. RMA'd that one to get a third one, and saw that it was one of the early batches that had a ton of issues and I didn't bother keeping it to find out what was wrong with it.
So Google, if it has any hopes for displacing iPad, needs to clamp down on quality issues with its suppliers and make sure that these products match up to the incumbents they are hell bent on displacing.
They aren't keeping up with demand. Eg. in Finland they've been constantly sold out since it launched a few weeks ago (same time with Scandinavia). The 16GB version is 269.90 EUR / 350.68 USD, and doesn't include the $25 Play voucher, the 8GB version is not sold here at all.
I suspect there is one set of primary-market/trend-setter countries where Google is selling it with near-zero margins and has first cut of shipments, and then the rest of the world where Asus sells it through their retailers and collects a lucrative profit margin.
Here in Slovakia, Asus sells it directly (without Google) and it is 229 EUR for 16GB version. The upcoming 32GB version is going to be for the same amount and the 32GB+3G version will be 299 EUR.
It looks like it is just retailers in Finland who are bloating the price.
How does that price comparison compare with what you'd normally see for tech products?
What would an entry level retina iPad cost in Finland for instance?
I only ask as I know in the UK we always get the impression that we're being shafted when we look at US prices but it's not that there are higher profit margins, it's more about higher taxes, lower volumes and so on.
One of my pet peeve's in articles like this is to change the metrics midway. Specifically, all Nexus references are made to monthly sales. So you see things like "600,000 per month" or "nearly 1 million per month"
Switch to Apple sales and it's "15 million in Q3" Holy smoke that's huge compared to Nexus!! Yet imagine another headline stating "Nexus taking nearly 20% of marketshare from Apple iPad!" 1 million per month and ramping = 3 million a quarter which is 20% of 15 million and so forth.
I have neither an iPad nor a Nexus 7 so no dog in this fight (MacBook Air and Nexus S phone) I just wanted to point out the annoyance when you use different measuring units within the one article. It can really distort the outlook.
Final note - more impressive to me than the total number sold is the ramp. This is significant month over month momentum since launching. I suspect the iPad Mini - now that the wait is over- will either a) drive sales higher based on the price/value differential or b) knee cap momentum. Based purely on a sample case of 1 (me) I held off the Nexus 7 until the iPad Mini arrived. The iOS and ecosystem still beats Android but based on the price differential I'll go with the Nexus 7 now. The gaps that exist between the two are continuing to close due to where both are in their respective life cycles.
My guess is that replacements are new devices (which replace your old device), while repairs are not new devices , but instead your original device, repaired.
My friend had his Nexus 7 in his pocket (as he always had done) and just the process of sitting on the couch caused enough pressure to destroy the screen.
Google / ASUS provided no support and he just went and bought a whole new device (he was told the price of repair was basically the same as replacement).
Unlike most of the devices I've seen when the screen was cracked (really just a hairline crack across the face), it became completely unusable.
Yeah I have had that experience about 4 times now, like you said, when cracked its completely useless. I broke the first one by sitting the device on the top of a stack of books and research material and then proceeding to pick that bundle up. My thumb holding the nexus 7 and that was enough to put a split from corner to corner. I have given up on the device and Android. I went back to using my old ipad 1 which has been dropped and thrown about for 2-3 years now and not even a scratch or buff on the back and certainly no cracks or chips on the screen. I made the mistake of getting a nexus 7 for my brother and both parents and they have ALL had problems with it (each was about £209 in the UK). They are all getting ipads now.
There is probably a bottleneck in sales, too, because Nexus 7 is only available for sale in like under 10 countries, while the iPad is available in many more.
I'm always slightly curious about these when they appear, when they say they're selling X amount per month, do they mean they've sold X amount per month that are in consumers hands, or X amount per month where so many are in consumer hands, so many are in retail supply chains? Same goes for Apple, but to a larger extent they manage sales through their own channels.
Obviously N7 is delayed shipment in many places so I imagine a lot are in peoples hands, still curious.
Do you think Retailers are stocking up on phones that aren't selling? That each month, fifty thousand electronic devices are stored in stockrooms, never to be seen again?
The units sold to consumers closely resembles the tail of current shipped units, just delayed a bit; the larger the number and the bigger ticket the item the closer those curves are.
Occasionally yeah, retail stores will buy stock that may end up dead. Obviously not at the moment as they can't keep them in stock, I'm just curious whether either company is showing sales figures including the retail supply chain bought ones as well.
It's a fair question, as channel stuffing is not unheard of. The HP TouchPad, for instance, shipped far more units than were sold to customers. At one point Best Buy sat on over 200 000 unsold TouchPads that were returned to HP and eventually priced at just $99 each to get rid of the inventory.
With that said, I think the correlation between shipping numbers and sales for the Nexus 4 is probably close, considering the clear demand for the phone.
The blogs like to make a distinction between the two numbers, but realistically there isn't one except for in extreme cases like the HP touchpad. Retail sales might happen a month after wholesale sales, but they are still sales. If a retailer isn't selling it's stock, it isn't going to re-order and that will be reflected in wholesale numbers.
Well, the difference was big enough for Apple iPad sales last quarter that they shipped 28% more YoY, while sell-through increased about 44%. The difference was due to inventory increases last year, compared to inventory decreases this year.
Note that selling 1 million a month is obviously great for Android, but it's not even close to the same as say selling 1 million Galaxy S3's per month. Asus and Google have both basically said that they are selling the Nexus 7 at break even or a small loss. Google pretty much has to do this, but it's not exactly helping their bottom line in the same way that Apple selling 1 million iPad Mini's helps Apple's bottom line. At $130 profit per device (which is probably a bit low) Apple would profit $1.56 billion per year with the same sales volume, vs basically $0 per year for Google/Asus.
It might not be all about profit for everybody, but $1.56 billion buys a lot of R&D, advanced manufacturing, etc. which puts Apple in an even better strategic position on both the product and operations side of the business, which continues to drive profit.
I think you're already somewhat saying this, but to clarify, there's a big difference between where the money comes from with selling an iPad vs. a Nexus 7.
1) Google doesn't make money on the selling of the hardware, but with customers using their services and getting locked in their platform. They not only have more "billboards" for ads, but more ways to extract more data, and more meaningful data about its users. More data, more targetted ads, more money. (Google Play may also make some money selling digital goods, a la Kindle Fire)
2) This lessens their reliance on other platforms/browsers to use Google as their default search engine. On a non-Google browser, they would have to pay to be the default search engine (Firefox/Safari), or even worse, not be the default search engine at all (IE).
3) A last, small advantage is that with browser/device marketshare they can push for particular web technologies that are beneficial for Google.
So it's not entirely accurate to say that it's $0 per year for Google; someone has definitely made the calculations for #1 and #2 before pricing the Nexus 7.
As long as Google remains a healthy giant company profits should not matter to anyone except Google and Apple investors. For everybody else this is great news. For android developers and users it means that there is more incentive for making tablet apps. For Apple and Amazon users it means that there is serious competition which should mean lower prices and continued innovation going forward.
I strongly agree with you that competition is good so far as motivates further innovation and, to a much lesser extent, lowers prices.
The idea that "profits should not matter to anyone but...investors" I think may be a shortsighted view. In the short term obviously everyone loves low prices, it let's us get more fun geek gear and more often. In the long term I think an "adequate" profit is necessary for these companies to continue innovating. When a company interested primarily in one area (say, advertising) moves into another area (say, hardware) in a manner that attempts to eliminate the profits from the new area are cause, in my opinion, for concern.
In this regard, MS's approach with Surface, while very very challenging to its "partners" (perhaps unfairly challenging), is at least an approach that makes it clear that MS expects a reasonable profit margin on Surface. I don't see such behavior with Google and the Nexus 7.
> As long as Google remains a healthy giant company profits should not matter to anyone except Google and Apple investors. For everybody else this is great news.
You are forgetting Asus. I'm sure they care whether they make money.
Let's not forget all of these N7s come with a $25 Play credit. This is great for Android devs. We've seen a big increase in sales since it went on sale this summer.
Got my son a Nexus 7 for his birthday and he loves it, am impressed as well (currently have a iPad 1). One thing I don't get though is how some top games are free on android and cost money on iOS ? Bad Piggies for instance, is 1.99 for iPad and free on Android and I can't see any ads on it or that it's a cut down version.
With all the wonderful things Android-phones has done for the general smart-phone, it was about time we had the same revolution happen in tablet-space.
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